


the rust in our apertures

by nanodarlings (incendiarism)



Series: i promise you, i was here [3]
Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Apocalypse, Alternate Universe - Small Town, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Angst, Domestic, Everything is Beautiful and Everything Hurts, M/M, Non-Linear Narrative, Time Skips, implied major character death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-13
Updated: 2020-06-13
Packaged: 2021-03-04 03:42:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,698
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24596959
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/incendiarism/pseuds/nanodarlings
Summary: It’s funny, in a twisted meaning of the word, just how much Jaemin misses. Like some badly written love song, really, along the lines of distance makes the heart grow fonder, or something equally as cheesy. Swap out the romantic interest for, well, everything—and Jaemin might as well be crooning ballads at the hole-in-the-wall café down Main Street.In which the unfolding of the end is a slow jam sort of thing. Melancholic, romantic, apocalyptic. Poetry read aloud on a bleary Sunday afternoon; quiet lofi filtering in through shitty headphones. Decay softly creeping into the abandoned days and orphaned nights.
Relationships: Lee Jeno/Na Jaemin
Series: i promise you, i was here [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1724401
Comments: 11
Kudos: 33
Collections: NOMIN FIC FEST





	the rust in our apertures

**Author's Note:**

> prompt 105: jeno and jaemin playing on the swings at a small playground that nobody goes to anymore.
> 
> hello hello, welcome to this fic! to the dear prompter: i...ended up diverging a lot from the original prompt, but i hope you like it anyways? wahh @____@ it really is such a lovely prompt and i hope i did it justice!
> 
> to everyone: thank you so much for clicking! i hope that you enjoy. also if you would like mood music, i really recommend [this](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3cIhqRaBliaVr3H9gZGqS9?si=4IezAhVHThWbaWaqhZ3rCA) playlist of piano music!

The sky's bright. You look great.

In a word, in a phrase, it's a movie,

you're the star,

so smile for the camera, it's your big scene,

you know your lines.

\- Planet of Love, Richard Siken

In their many years of friendship, Na Jaemin has had a lot of good ideas: sneaking out onto the rooftop of Jeno’s apartment to watch an eclipse, skipping class the day they happened to have had a pop quiz, convincing Jeno to work at the same coffee shop as him—the list goes on.

This is… not one of those ideas.

The clear signs of abandonment are plastered all across the playground: patchy mulch that never got fixed, overgrown weeds springing up wherever they can manage to survive, and eerie creaking that accompanies every step.

Jaemin breathes in deep, scanning the area around him.

Next to him, Jeno says: “This is it, isn’t it?” 

Flakes of rust rub onto their hands from where they’re tightened around the chains of the swingset—brown specks peeling off of the metal in handfuls. Jeno looks regal from where he’s perched on the seat of his throne: outlined by the last rays of the sun bleeding out in the dying sky. His legs scuff around on the dirt packed ground, trying to kick around despite having long outgrown the height of the swingset.

Damn.

Jaemin says: “This is it. The end of the world is finally here.” He smiles—the markings of a man who’s only begun to go mad with the weight of everything falling apart around him. “And, well. Isn’t it beautiful?”

They’re sitting ducks if they were to ever get cornered, met with a golden mob of the undead, all hellbent on their destruction. Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. Nothing but a few pieces of metal and wood and plastic cobbled together for child’s play to protect them.

Jeno laughs, amused at Jaemin’s antics. “What, society rapidly crumbling in on itself? Yeah, gorgeous.”

“No, dumbass,” scoffs Jaemin, “That’s not what I meant.” He continues: “Just, the world slowly falling apart in showers of gold? Kinda poetic isn’t it? Like—” Jaemin holds up his hands as if he’s framing the entire landscape in its guts and glory: the mad auter that had decided to direct the apocalypse scene by scene, every shot meticulously scripted out and hammered down—

“Picture this: two-thirty-nine to one aspect ratio, that sort of sweeping shot, and some sorta dramatic color grading to really sell the mood. Tragic storyline to really get the tears going. Why, with a little bit of hard work, we could have a blockbuster on our hands!”

“Blockbuster, eh? You think that’d be enough to get us out of this place?” Jeno quips, still trying to make the swingset work even though all his attempts have been futile so far. Misplaced boy, square piece trying to fit into the triangle gap—it’s the sort of thing that’s never going to work out, but it’s strangely endearing to watch anyways. That certain air of wistfulness at outgrowing the architecture.

Jaemin turns around so that Jeno’s situated at the center of his camera, the focal point of the shot. “Of course, Jeno. We’d be rich—household names, Oscar winners. Doesn’t that sound nice?”

Jeno surrenders, offers him a wane smile. “Sure, Jaemin. Sure.”

“You’d make a lovely movie star, I think. Have people all over the world falling for that face—don’t give me that look! You know I’m right.”

Black bars framing their interaction, cropping out the abandoned playground into some big-screen worthy moment.

Jeno huffs: “Hah. I know. You always are.”

—

The unfolding of the end is a slow jam sort of thing. Melancholic, romantic, apocalyptic. Poetry read aloud on a bleary Sunday afternoon; quiet lofi filtering in through shitty headphones. Decay softly creeping into the abandoned days and orphaned nights.

The food rations slowly declining in quality; the residents of the already slow moving town pattering out—a gradual deterioration of life as they knew it. Waste piling up, every corner jam-packed with things that simply don’t have any sort of use anymore.

You’re living in a world where everything has an expiration date. You’re living in a world where everyone is designed to die. And you’re human; you’re a bullet away from a dirty grave, a car crash away from a funeral procession. You know that. It’s practically written into every morning, how could you possibly forget?

You know that, but the regret still lingers. The feeling that if you’d just tried hard enough, none of this would be happening today.

It’s a funny thing, regret. Illogical most of the time. Has this awful, coppery taste that sits in your mouth.

There are… a lot of things that Jaemin regrets. Not believing Renjun when he was right about the world going to shit, not investing in that camera he’d been eyeing earlier, not fixing his relationship with his parents before they left.

Yeah.

One thing though, one thing that he’ll never regret?

Staying behind with Jeno.

Even when he says: “You should’ve just left me,” one day as they’re eating their dinners. When he continues in describing all the ways Jaemin would’ve been better off in the government sanctioned bunkers—less threat of being torn apart at the hands of the undead that swarm the city, and no threat of turning into one of the monsters himself.

Which, of course, are all logical points.

But— 

Jaemin pauses from where he’s examining the mushrooms on his plate that resemble chunks of rubber more than actual food. Turns to look Jeno in the eye and tells him once more:

“What, and leave you behind? Never, Lee Jeno. Never.”

— 

The piano in the living room is horribly out of tune. Neither of them know how to fix it.

It’s the kind of thing that they’d been putting off solving for ages beforehand, urgency placated by the slow, monotonous drone of their lives and the thought that _there’s always tomorrow to get it done_. The thing about everything always being the same tune is that it’s easy to forget to chime in sometimes.

It’s the kind of thing that you don’t learn to pay attention to until it’s too late.

So—the dinky notes, C sharp that’s a few hertz out of tune with its octave pairing. Jaemin and Jeno’s voices layered over top.

They’re not professional singers, far from it—that was always more Renjun, Donghyuck, and Chenle’s forte. But it’s got a reckless sort of charm to it anyways.

They leave it be.

—

Pause. Rewind, all the way back to when everything was normal:

They met one summer fifteen years ago in the same playground. Jeno is six years old, and Jaemin is almost six years old—on account of his late birthday—and they find each other on the newly installed swing-set, curiously introducing themselves as their mothers look on from the sidelines.

Jaemin ends up teaching Jeno how to swing: when to kick his feet forward and when to go back, how to shift his weight and pump properly. How to touch the sky.

They make a deal to come back at the same time next week, with the permission of their parents, and to keep on going, and so it becomes routine. Wake up, eat breakfast, count the minutes before it’s time to walk over and meet your newly found best friend. Learn to navigate the world with him, and maybe fall a few times along the way.

It’s okay if you fall.

Everything’s okay. You’re unstoppable—just keep holding on tight to the chains. Yeah, that’s it. Shut your eyes, feel the rush of air against your face, the shrieks of your best friend next to you.

It’s a picturesque childhood—crowned with that certain air of whimsicality and purity that some people spend their entire lives chasing—with the swingset catapulting them to even greater heights.

Now, all you have to do is keep holding on for dear life. And then you’ll learn how to fly.

— 

Scene start:

This one is set on a small outcropping of a balcony; this one is filmed during the first few peckings of dawn, a picture book sunrise filled out with all the right shades and colors lighting up the shot.

In a different time—in a better time—the soundscape is made up of the chirping of birds and the slow mumblings of the world waking up and going about their day. The rumbling of trucks going by to collect the garbage, the slow meandering of mail being delivered. A perfect demonstration of suburbia in its full glory.

But as things stand, the whole place is a ghost town. Population count of two, as far as they’re concerned.

(There is, of course, the matter of the hordes of undead occupying the place. If you count them, the town suddenly booms—but doing so messes with the numbers too much, fucks with the statistics. Meaning that it’s easier just to be blissfully oblivious to their existence, meaning that it’s easier to just forget.)

Jaemin and Jeno sit on the balcony of Jeno’s apartment, watching the sunrise in their strange little bubble of existence. And it feels fragile. Easily breakable. Blink one time too many and everything bursts.

It leaves Jaemin with this constant need to check-in on Jeno, make sure that he’s still real and alive and not one of the hallucinations that comes with slowly turning into one of the undead.

Hmm. Yeah.

So sometimes, like today, he’ll find himself reaching out just to make sure. Hands finding their way to his shoulders, waist, asking _are you still here?_ The planes of Jeno’s figure, all of his muscle and flesh and bone captured momentarily underneath Jaemin’s touch.

And Jeno brightens with the attention, giving Jaemin one of his trademark smiles—the one with eyes that curl into pretty crescent moons, the one with crinkles forming at the edges of his mouth.

Jaemin feels so very much. Jaemin’s heart is going to melt into puddles pooling in his chest.

Which somehow translates to him blurting out: “We should slow-dance,” and Jeno making the ever endearing confused noise he does, a small _huh_ that causes Jaemin’s heart melt even more. 

Jaemin laughs. “You heard me, let’s slow dance. Come on, what were all of those years of lessons for if you can’t even do this?”

“Okay first of all—I took hip hop and contemporary, not… ballroom? What style even is slow dancing… and second of all—to what music?”

Jaemin thinks about it for a second before lighting up. “We can sing! Come on, Jeno,” he says before breaking out into the first notes of some nostalgic tune from their childhoods. Some pop-y summer hit that you couldn’t go a day without hearing on the radio, something addictive and catchy that got stuck in your head within a few listens.

And Jeno looks slightly exasperated, but he lets Jaemin pull him up and into position, lets Jaemin wrap his arms around him, and his voice eventually joins in Jaemin’s singing as his feet find the rhythm.

It’s not a serious thing; it’s no big deal. They burst into peals of laughter every time one of them steps on the other’s foot.

The solid warmth of Jeno underneath his hands. Speckles of rust lining his face, smatterings of the golden dust laid out against his skin. Jaemin thinks, rather darkly: _Who knew that death could be so gorgeous?_

And: _This is it, baby. You and me, for the rest of our lives._

Because… they’ve only got so much time left. Both Jaemin and Jeno.

So Jaemin pulls him into a slow kiss, reveling in the familiarity of his mouth and the slow revolution that is Lee Jeno.

And: _Ah,_ Jaemin realizes with certain clarity, _so this is what the end of the world tastes like._

It’s the sharp tang of copper from the way both of their gums haven’t stopped bleeding since the first few signs of infection set in; it’s the way sometimes Jaemin simply has to hold Jeno as he starts trembling uncontrollably from the illness—or vice-versa. It’s realizing that they’re gradually starting to lose it, day by day.

“This is it, baby. You and me, and the apocalypse. You and me, till the end of time,” Jaemin says with a flourish, momentarily breaking out of song.

Jeno grins as they continue swaying in tempo, despite the absence of a real tune to keep them in time. “You and me, till the end of time,” he echoes.

Outside: the sounds of the rest of the undead residents slowly waking up. The crash of trash cans being knocked over, the wailing of the people who’ve been fully claimed by the infection already, with no hope of return.

_Till the end of time._

Scene cut.

—

Click. Stop. Rewind again:

“Do you think we’ll ever make it out of here?” Jeno throws out one day as they’re staked out in Jaemin’s room, spending yet another sticky summer night sleeping over at one of the pair’s houses. Jaemin startles out of his concentration on the game he was playing—watching his pixelated character die a sad death on screen—before turning to Jeno at the sudden question.

He responds: “What, like if we’ll find a way to colonize other planets? If the front door will stop being finicky and let you out to go home? You gotta be more specific here, Jeno.”

Jeno scoffs and swats lightly at Jaemin in mock annoyance. “Oh, fuck off. You know what I meant.”

And Jaemin chuckles and teases him some more, but he does know what Jeno means. It’s the sort of thing that they’ve discussed before, late night conversations eventually winding their way to the topic of their shitty little town and how everyone talks of doing more, going to bigger and better places but no one seems to achieve it. But it’s also the sort of thing that’s mutually acknowledged as a mere pipe dream, throwaway plans that lead to nowhere.

“With luck like yours? No chance,” Jaemin deflects instead as he watches the house of cards Jeno’s building fall once more.

Jeno snorts. “Yeah, I guess you’re right. You, me, and this dump for forever, eh?”

“Hah. Yup.”

“Yup.”

—

It’s funny, in a twisted meaning of the word, just how much Jaemin misses.

Like some badly written love song, really, along the lines of _distance makes the heart grow fonder_ ,or something equally as cheesy.Swap out the romantic interest for, well, _everything_ —and Jaemin might as well be crooning ballads at the hole-in-the-wall café down Main Street.

Or, well. He would be, if they weren’t currently very much out of business.

What the end of the world does to people, eh?

Like how Jaemin finds himself on his balcony, staring down at his scuffed Vans with the supposedly white parts leaning more towards a dirty gray, marveling with a sick sort of wonder at how _goddamn quiet_ everything is. At the absence of the mechanical hum of the lawnmower, the pacing footsteps coming from the neighbors above through too-thin ceiling, the odd shouts filtering in from the playground a block down.

It’s a bit like having the air knocked out of your lungs and being left to reconcile what it’s like to live without something you used to take for granted. A bit like telling a joke, but the punchline falls so flat it might as well concave.

Funny, remember?

It’s walking around in hopeless silence, save for the occasional shuffling of a golden mob outside and maybe the dinky notes of the out-of-tune piano when they’re feeling on the careless side of bravery. It’s feeling like the world is far, far too big but suffocating at the same time. It’s skin-tight, hypodermic, but hauntingly open. Pins and needles in gooseflesh. Empty skies. Claustrophobia. That sort of weird, weird mixture of feelings.

It’s that horrible sort of longing for a past you can never reclaim, packaged neatly in a bottle and thrown cast far out into an ocean of horrid realizations that slam into you one hazy afternoon because there’s nothing else to think about.

And… yeah. This is the new normal.

— 

The thing about the apocalypse is that it doesn’t really set in for a long, long time.

Jaemin reads the concerning news articles for months, answers concerned phone calls from his mother more and more frequently, watches the panic grow and fester within his university’s halls. And theoretically, he knows that something is terribly, terribly _wrong_ , but it feels like a realization so large that he can’t properly comprehend it, like some eldritch horror.

Even when he’s sent back home, even when the first case hits their town—even when everyone around him leaves and it’s just him and Jeno. Still, nothing.

But if Jaemin had to pinpoint the moment where everything clicks though, he’d have to say when he first gets the damning marks that indicate that the illness has set in.

Yeah.

He spots it in the middle of the night one day, a coincidental glance in the mirror as he’s coming out of the shower. A wash of gold plastered neatly across his face, starting at the bridge of his nose and fanning out against his cheeks.

It’s a bit reminiscent of some painting of a deer that Jaemin had seen months ago before the world went to shit, and it’s oddly fitting: deer in the headlights, freezing as it’s confronted with its impending doom

Because if it’s one thing to know that you’re going to die eventually, it’s another to see the brandings of fate marked so clearly on your body. Another thing to be confronted with it so directly.

And: _You chose this_ , a thin voice says quietly, from that ugly little part inside Jaemin that he tries so hard to shove down into nothingness. _You could’ve left ages ago. You could’ve been safe._

Remember when Jaemin said that he didn’t regret it?

Well, that’s more of a half truth.

Jaemin’s heart believes in everything that he’s done and doesn’t know how to look back, but every once in a while there’s some stupid survival instinct that comes in and tries to tell him otherwise. But— 

“Yeah, maybe,” he says, out loud this time just to prove it to himself, to hear it with his own ears and fully internalize it— “But Jeno couldn’t have.”

And that’s what everything boils down to, isn’t it? Jeno.

The voice stays quiet this time.

— 

The fairy lights strung against the wall don’t light up anymore; the clocks hung up around the house stopped ticking. Stacks of batteries—some dead, some half-charged—pile up on tables. The remainders of candles burnt all the way down to their waxy graves shoved somewhere mostly out of sight. Emptied out matchboxes.

They’re running out of time. They’re losing the ability to keep on pretending.

It’s not a pretty sight to see.

Well, no. That’s not quite accurate— 

It’s a cruel trick of the universe: whatever infection it is that’s killing everyone off slowly, turning them into mindless monsters, also happens to hold incredible aesthetic appeal. The world is gorgeous as it destroys itself. Skin turning violent shades of gold, eerie glows smeared across the whips of clouds in the sky.

A picturesque demise.

Jaemin’s old cam-recorder stopped working a long time ago, and his polaroid camera had to have its batteries stripped for more useful purposes. But he likes to think that all of it would make for some sort of twisted masterpiece of a film, one final show of grandeur before surrender.

—

Scene start:

Jaemin knows that the end is near.

He can tell, easily, by how neither of them move much anymore—too consumed with coughing when they try. By how their food rations grow more and more untouched as they lose their appetites. By how the gold almost covers their entire bodies.

One day, as they’re lying in bed together after waking up, Jeno asks: “What if we went to the capital right now? Talked to our families one more time?”

He’s not being serious, Jaemin knows that. Most days they don’t even make it out of their room anymore, nevermind outside. But he humors him anyways, like he always does— 

“We’d probably get shot on sight—you remember what the deal was. The government keeps the power running and the meals delivering for a few months, and we sit our asses tight and don’t contaminate anyone until we meet our tragic ends.”

“Ah, right. Unfortunate. I guess they wouldn’t really want to see us like this anyways… you think that we could somehow find wherever Renjun and Donghyuck ran off to though?” Jeno wonders as he shuffles closer to Jaemin.

“Hmm. Maybe, who knows with those two… they could still be in town for all we know. Or they could be halfway across the country.”

“Hah. Yeah, sounds about right.”

They fade off into easy silence after that, with nothing much else to say. Jaemin thinks that Jeno drifts in and out of sleep a few times.

Jaemin doesn’t blame him.

Jaemin is… tired. He’s so, _so_ tired.

Everything feels heavy, like it’s all been dipped in tar. It drips over his eyes, seeps into his bones. Something like the weighted blanket that he used to have. Something like slowly sinking into the mattress.

He holds Jeno closer. Jeno is warm, solid. Human, or at least human enough.

And he lets his eyes slip shut, wondering how many more times he has to do this.

Falls back asleep and hopes that it’s not many.

Scene cut.

We were in the gold room where everyone

finally gets what they want, so I said _What do you_

 _want, sweetheart?_ and you said _Kiss me_. Here I am

leaving you clues. I am singing now while Rome

burns. We are all just trying to be holy. My applejack,

my silent night, just mash your lips against me.

We are all going forward. None of us are going back.

\- Snow and Dirty Rain, Richard Siken

**Author's Note:**

> thank you so much for reading! as always, any and all thoughts are appreciated and welcome, either here in the comments or on twt + cc. also side note, this fic is actually set in the same universe as [this series](https://archiveofourown.org/series/1724401), so if you want more (considerably less angsty) stuff from this universe, feel free to check that out too!
> 
> twt: [@nanodarlings](https://twitter.com/nanodarlings)  
> cc: [aphelions](https://curiouscat.me/aphelions)  
> 
> 
> [inspiration](https://hereinevitably.dreamwidth.org/5123.html)


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